What Are You Doing?
Sermon Preached on February 11, 2005
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary
Well, it’s Lent again. And at this time of the year, there is that predictable question that comes out of all of our mouths, similar to the question that we ask around New Year’s. At New Year’s we ask, “So what is your New Year’s resolution?” And one week after New Year’s we ask, “So how long did you last?” At Lent, of course, the question is: “What are you giving up for Lent?” And then one week later, “So how long did you last?” I will always remember my first Lent. One of the college pastors had suggested fasting—a topic that is central to our OT lesson from Isaiah, Psalm 51, and the text from Matthew’s gospel. What he didn’t make clear was how to fast, or how long one should fast. Not being raised in the church, when I heard that we should fast, I assumed that meant that I shouldn’t eat...for a long time. I made it until the third or fourth day of Lent, before my will caved in. I found that living on just water for that amount of time makes you dizzy, and hungry. I also felt something else when I broke my fast...guilt. I thought that I had failed God, that my flesh was too weak, that I had proved yet again that I was a hopeless sinner. You have to love that good ole American evangelical guilt. I understood that fasting was supposed to help me clear my mind so that I could focus on prayer and the godly things that were really important. What I found at the end of my fast was that, more so than ever, I was focused on me—my own weak condition, my own failures and shortcomings.
When we read a passage like the one we find in Isaiah 58, with its call for justice and fair treatment of all people especially those who are oppressed, I think it is our tendency to see how we fall short, how we don’t measure up as the community of God’s people. And our congregations and communities are easy targets for such criticism. We are too white, too male, too heterosexual, and definitely too wealthy. Most of all, we feel guilty—guilty for who we are, guilty for who we are not, guilty for the accidents of birth that were dealt to us, guilty for those who are present and for those who are not. I have observed an interesting phenomenon when people of color share their stories of marginalization, isolation, and humiliation. Stories that arise inevitably when you live in a society that values some group of people over others based on the color of skin, gender, income, or sexual orientation. Usually the response to such stories from a predominantly white congregation or community is guilt—thick, nasty, ugly white guilt. If we step back and look at such a response, it looks odd doesn’t it? A person—a fellow human being—is experiencing pain, and rather than empathy, compassion, or even resolve that this should never happen to anybody, we find responses of guilt. And then the blame game begins. “Why do you have to bring that up again?” “Why does everything have to be about race?” OR from people of color, “Why does my pain have to be all about you?” “Why don’t you listen or do something?” The finger pointing and blame suggest that we haven’t progressed much farther than our primeval ancestors in the garden. When something goes wrong, literally all hell breaks loose, and we exit the garden alienated from each other and from God. This madness has to stop.
So what do we do? Of course, there are no easy solutions to such a problem. The cultural scripts from which we respond are persistent and reinforced through the structures within which we live. I think, however, that the prophet’s words in Isaiah 58 point to a different way—even as Jesus’ eating with sinners suggests a new reality—a new way of being the community of God, one where all are welcome to the great banquet of the LORD. Unlike the assumptions behind our questions about Lent—What do we have to give up? What is it that I am not doing?—the scripture compels us to think about how our actions or inactions communicate who we are. The prophet is not brow-beating, but is appealing to the best of our human instincts—the kinds of things we normally feel when we see a fellow human being in need. When you see another person bound and in chains, isn’t there a voice inside you that says, “free him, free her.” When you see someone hungry, dying with a bloated belly from famine, isn’t it your instinct to want to get some food in that person’s mouth? When you see someone exposed to the cold of winter with no place to stay, don’t you wish you could clothe that person? The guilt comes when we shut off those God given instincts and, as the scripture says, “hide ourselves from our own kin.”
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
When you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly;
Your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
You shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”
If we live into who we are as the people of God, if we listen to the voice of the Spirit that compels us toward the plight of our fellow human being regardless of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or class; then we begin to live into the vision of humanity that lies behind this great feast that we call the banquet of the LORD, where Jesus, God’s son, dines with sinners. Amen
Posted by Frank Yamada at February 11, 2005 06:19 PM